


The Stillness Remaining

by flamethrower



Series: Innocuous Juxtapositions Outside of Time and Space [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Don't copy to another site, Family, Family Secrets, GFY, Gen, Season 3 aftermath, Tenth Doctor Era, Time Lord Angst, Time Lords and Ladies, feelscoaster, last of the time lords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 03:30:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20090557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower
Summary: After the Master is dead and the world is restored, the Jones family is stuck with the memories of horrors they will never forget. Jack Harkness isn't exactly happy about it, either, but they're still going to wait, all of them, for the Doctor to come back from a burning pyre.Or: The Doctor decides to replace his emotions with all of the words he can voice in one sitting, as usual.





	The Stillness Remaining

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why my brain suddenly decided it wanted to write about the end of Season 3, but it happened, all at once, and it's a bloody feels-coaster because Ten does not know the meaning of Shut Up.
> 
> Also: there is slightly blended canon here, sort of, but it's things that have never been specifically *denied* as being canonical, either, so it's fair game.
> 
> NOTE NOTE: This story can be read as a Standalone or as part of the series it's listed under. Either/or, your mileage may vary.

The pub was quiet.

Jack Harkness couldn’t say he blamed anyone for the silence, because he was being quiet, too. It wasn’t the time for reminiscing or terrible jokes, or even his favorite fallback of flirting.

Everyone was hurting. Francine and Clive, Tish and Martha. Jack, too, but he didn’t want to admit it. Then he’d have to think about it, and there was a time and a place for reminiscing about torture. That place was called _never fucking ever_, and he’d learned that lesson a long, long time ago.

They, along with a small handful of people, had seen the world destroyed, the world suffering, humanity dying in droves. Most of them had watched from above, granted a wonderful sense of detachment.

Martha had witnessed it up close and in person, over and over again. Jack kept trying not to blurt out that he wanted to hire her for Torchwood yesterday, but that probably wouldn’t go over so well right now.

So, Jack did what he always did when people needed peace and quiet: he bribed the pub’s owner into closing early for a private party fresh out of a funeral. The staff knew to keep the drinks and the chips coming, or whatever anyone wanted, and to otherwise leave them the hell alone.

They were also waiting. It was one more vigil from a year of vigils. Everything was over and put back to rights. The Master was dead. This particular vigil shouldn’t have felt so awful, but it just vibrated unwanted _everything_ all over the place.

The door to the pub finally swung open. Jack caught a whiff of driftwood smoke with an acrid undertone that was definitely not of this Earth.

Joey the pub owner tried to intercept him. “Hey, mate, we’re closed.”

“No, s’all right, they were waiting for me,” the Doctor replied. He sounded beaten and worn.

Despite his anger, Jack felt a moment of intense sympathy. He wasn’t yet certain what the Doctor was going to say, but Jack had a feeling that, out of all of them, he was the only one with the range of experience to understand it.

“Hey, Doc,” Jack said, if only to break up the continuing silence.

“Jack.” The Doctor hung up his coat on the rack by the door, loosened his tie, and approached with his hands shoved into his pockets. “Sorry. It…took me a while.”

“Why?” Clive asked, frowning. He wasn’t as easy to rile as Francine. Jack had tried.

What could he say? They’d been terrified, yeah, but also bored out of their minds.

“It…takes a while. For a Time Lord’s body to burn,” the Doctor answered. “Jack, is there anything to drink in this place?”

Martha stared at the Doctor. “You don’t drink.”

“Tonight I do,” the Doctor countered, and then rubbed at his eyes with both hands. “Nothing that’ll kill me, all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you go it,” Jack said, and went to the bar. He studied the rows of bottles, thinking on Time Lord/Gallifreyan physiology for a moment. The Doctor’s previous incarnation had been a bit fond of a sip of 41st century cognac, but the Doctor’s current tongue couldn’t stand it, so that was out. Also, wrong century. “Hey. Cane sugar vodka?” Jack asked Joey. It sounded like a kid’s name, or someone from the American mafia, but Joey was Aussie, so it fit…in the bad pun sort of way.

“Sure is,” Joey said. “How do you want it?”

“Triple shot in a pineapple daiquiri, no dairy, no extra perks.” Jack liked to joke that he was a little bit psychic, but it wasn’t actually a joke. If the end of the world hadn’t happened, it would have been banana.

Bananas would be depressing. Jack thought they were all depressed enough as it was.

Jack walked over and sat down the pineapple daiquiri in front of the Doctor. “On the house, Doc.”

“Thanks.” The Doctor prodded absently at the drink with the straw, sniffed at it, and decided it was all right—though he immediately gave the speared set of maraschino cherries to Tish. Jack hid a smile; the Doctor always could read the room pretty damned well, and the gesture made Martha’s sister smile.

Martha waited until half the daiquiri was gone. “You gave him a _funeral?_” she burst out.

The Doctor glanced at her. “Seems like maybe it would be a bit more civilized in the universe if everyone remembered that after the fighting was done, we were all still just people.”

Martha leaned back, frowning. Jack knew the look. It was the expression of someone who knew their emotions were spot on, but the person they were angry with had just made a valid point, and now they needed a new angle.

God, was Jack familiar with that expression. He’d had to do so much growing up in the years since he’d first met the Doctor. Sometimes it was so much, too much to fit into one human lifetime. He was_ still_ learning, and he was over two hundred years old. Martha didn’t have that kind of time.

Time was relentless. Sometimes Jack hated it.

“I think, what Martha is really trying to say…” Francine swallowed as the Doctor looked up from the empty daiquiri glass. Jack thought about getting another, but the Doctor glanced at him and sent a brief, telepathic pulse that meant _Nope_. Jack nodded; heard and understood.

“I think Martha is angry because you forgave him,” Francine said. “I don’t know how you could have done that. I saw what the Master did to you.”

“So did I,” Tish whispered, and then rather decisively put the last cherry in her mouth so she wouldn’t have to speak.

“Why wouldn’t I?” the Doctor asked. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the smell of smoke—and that extra-terrestrial odor—was clinging to his clothing. He tilted his head. “You’re Christian, right?”

“I—well. I’m not certain what that has to do with anything,” Francine stuttered.

Clive sighed. “I do. Turn the other cheek, forgive others of their trespass, that sort of thing.”

Martha let out a frustrated noise. “He’d just tried to exterminate the Earth, followed by everyone in the bloody _universe_!” she yelled. “And it wasn’t two seconds later that you were forgiving him, and it’s just—Christ never had to deal with a mental alien bent on the entire planet’s destruction!”

“Look, I don’t care if you think the carpenter was a god or not. Really wasn’t the point, I always thought, and yes, he actually did have to deal with an alien trying to wipe out the Earth, but that is a _really_ long story and I can’t tell it because I promised him I wouldn’t. Bit embarrassing,” the Doctor said. Jack smiled; once the Doctor finally started talking, there was going to be no stopping him. He was sometimes afraid of that, especially right now, but at the same time, he understood why. Ianto would be the first to point out that Jack also had a habit of forgetting to shut up. Ever.

“So then _why_,” Francine insisted, dabbing at her eyes when the waterworks started up. Jack tried to offer her a handkerchief before he realized he didn’t have one anymore. Shit. “Why could you just…you begged the bastard not to die. _Why?_”

“Was it just because you didn’t want to be alone in the universe?” Martha hesitantly suggested.

The Doctor glanced at Martha. “With trillions and trillions of people roaming about? No, not that.”

“Please. Why?” Francine repeated. “I spent a year in hell. I think that deserves an answer.”

The Doctor glanced down at the tabletop. “Because, a very long time ago, when he had a different name, the Master was the first and best friend I ever had.”

Jack felt himself freeze in place. The Doctor talked about the past about as much as a slug talked about a love of salt. He quickly looked at Francine, Clive, Martha, and Tish, using his eyes to tell them to _shut up_. If they said a word, then this wouldn’t ever come out…and Jack thought maybe it had to.

“You remember I told you about the Eye, about how everyone who was going into the Academy had to look at it?” the Doctor asked, but barely waited for Martha and Jack to nod. “It shows you the whole potential of time and space, all at once, to see if you can handle it.”

“You said you ran,” Martha murmured.

“Yeah, well. I graduated first. Well, first they tried to kick me out, then they discovered I’d already hooked into the system and passed all the final exams, so they had to graduate me with high honors, _then_ they expelled me,” the Doctor explained with a faint air of amusement. “It’s…look.”

The Doctor abruptly changed emotional tracks, and Jack braced on instinct. “If a dog catches rabies and attacks someone, who do you blame? The rabies, or the dog?”

“The disease, usually,” Martha admitted. “Or the owner, if they weren’t doing their job with the vaccinations.”

The Doctor tipped his empty glass at her. “Yeah. The Master—I’m sorry, I can’t tell you his old name. Also a promise. Anyway, the Master knew he wasn’t ready to look into the Eye. Neither of us were. All of us were too young, to be honest, but since that was,” the Doctor pauses and raises his hands to use finger-quotes, “how it was _always done_, that’s what the Time Lords at the Academy did. Shoved a bunch of eight-year-old children in front of the whole potential of the universe and told them to look.

“That was the infectious bite, right there,” the Doctor continued softly. “That was where the rabies started.”

Jack swallowed, hearing it as a loud click that tried to echo in the pub. “So, Time Lord adults were the ones not so handy with the vaccine?”

“Yeah, something like that,” the Doctor admitted. “It wasn’t really something that turned up at first, anyway. He was…fine. He was more than fine. He was brilliant. Romana could claim top of the class all she wanted, but she didn’t want to remember when he’d been—when he’d been right in the head. If she didn’t remember it, she couldn’t blame herself just as much as she blamed me.”

“So this other Time Lord student—she blamed you for the Master’s madness?” Clive asked, looking truly insulted on the Doctor’s behalf.

“Sometimes. Romana didn’t want to talk about it most of the time, not less she was pointing in a specific direction of space and telling me to go clean up the mess the Master had made.” The Doctor rests his chin on his hands. “I never minded so much. Like I said: rabid dog. He wasn’t pulling schemes and setting up ridiculous ways of trying to kill me—or anyone else—because he was evil. Dogs with rabies don’t attack people because they’re evil, they do it because they don’t know what else to do anymore. All they know is that they have to do something, anything, because the virus in their brains is driving them mad.

“It was the same with him. Not for the sake of evil. Not for the sake of destruction. He was being driven mad, got there, went ’round the bend, and then was driven mad all over again,” the Doctor said. “He did it because he never knew what else to do. I tried—”

The Doctor’s voice cracked, leaving him staring down at the tabletop until Tish removed the lemon from her water and pushed it over to him, fresh straw included. “Thanks.” The Doctor took a drink, wiggled his fingers, and perked up a bit like a wilted flower. Jack sighed; Tish should have left the lemon in the water.

“I tried to help him so many times over the centuries. I really did. Problem is, I didn’t know what was wrong. None of us ever knew what was wrong, not really.” The Doctor glanced over, saw the abandoned lemon, and tossed it into the water glass. Then he found two more from a central dish and added them, too. “Electrolytes and citric acid,” he muttered, which made Martha smile for a bit.

“It’s just—it’s why I think it was the Eye.” The Doctor drank half the water and then started stabbing lemons with the straw. “I looked into it, and it was terrifying. All the awareness of time and space in the whole of the universe floods into your brain, d’you know that? All at once. They do it when we’re young because children’s brains are flexible, but I don’t think anyone was really meant to be that flexible. You never lose that awareness, even when you look away. Somewhere in your head,” the Doctor pointed at his temple, “you’re always, _always_ aware of what time is doing. Any time. Any where. Any _when_.

“The Time Lords who could look into the Eye and stand up afterwards, they thought…”

Jack could tell the Doctor was really starting to struggle when his hands flexed. His previous incarnation had been calmer, even in his rage. This one raged so easily that it could be frightening, especially when he tried so hard not to.

“They acted like knowing the whole of time and space made them _gods_,” the Doctor finally spat. There was such unexpected bitterness in his voice that Clive jumped, Francine leaned back in shock, Tish stared at him in horror, and Martha’s righteous anger crumbled into pity. “I ran because I was afraid I’d end up like them if I stayed. And, stars help me, I’m an arrogant bastard as it is. I really am. But I can’t…I couldn’t stand the idea of being like them, standing by while everything crumbled and acting like it was above my notice!”

“The Time War,” Jack said, unaware he was going to speak until the words poured out. “Is that why it happened?”

“A bit,” the Doctor allowed. “That refusal to step up and fix a mess that was sending ripples throughout time and space certainly didn’t improve anything. I can’t remember a lot of the War, Jack. It’s just not in my head, like I couldn’t take it. Humans do the same thing with too much trauma, and my father was human, so—”

“Wait. Wait. Uhm. Time War, yes, but what was that last part?” Martha asked in shock.

The Doctor lifted his head and blinked at them all. “Oh. Right. I keep forgetting that I can say that, and there’s no one else to hear it any longer.”

“Because the Time Lords didn’t know.” Jack felt a terrible pain in his chest that was almost like dying. “I know the history of the culture. Gallifrey would have rejected you.”

The Doctor pointed at him in a gesture of spot-on, well-done. “My mother was a Time Lord who decided that, well, she had her own bit of arrogance, but also enough brains left over to realize that we were going down a path she didn’t want to see continued. So, she skipped out on the usual ways of breeding, which was weird looming or actually bothering with sex—and oh, let me tell you, there were some really odd restrictions and thoughts happening there,” the Doctor added.

“So, my mother went out into the universe, found someone who was either human, or close enough, got pregnant, went home, and refused to tell anyone who the father was. That part wasn’t considered any sort of big deal, especially not after they tested my molecular structure and found that I took entirely after her—three strands of DNA, two hearts, the ability to read time without going starkers. Usual stuff. She didn’t even tell _me_, she was so worried about what might happen.

“So, I get married…” the Doctor paused and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t give me that look, Jack. You’ve read my files.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” Jack tried to school his face into something that wasn’t horrified sympathy and probably failed at it. “Go on, Doc.”

“I married someone who was a fit genetic match, though we weren’t all that fond of each other. Had kids. Those kids grew up, married, had their own kids. My best mate was the Time Lord equivalent of their godfather, but he was slowly losing his mind.

“Finally, I got sick of all of it, said bugger this for a lark, and decided I was leaving and taking one of the old ships with me. My youngest granddaughter, Susan, had already decided that she _hated_ the Academy and told me she was going with me, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t really mind. She didn’t fit in on Gallifrey any more than I did, and we both knew it. We went exploring, and after a bit of travel we found this technological backwater called Earth, right in the midst of the 1960s. We did not,” the Doctor halted briefly, a fond smile on his face, “fit in very well. Also, I was a berk.”

“You’re still a berk,” Martha muttered.

“Oh, no, way worse. You’d have hated me more than you already do,” the Doctor said, and Jack knew he was merely pretending not to see the way Martha’s expression went both angrily tight and sad at the same time. “When I finally went home again years later, to check in on the family, I told my mother about it all. I was on my third face by then, traveling with a lovely spitfire named Jo Grant. She thought Gallifrey was beautiful, but would tell off anyone who told her she didn’t belong there with some astoundingly foul language.

“Mum laughed so hard I thought she was going to regenerate right then and there.” The Doctor smiled a bit, warmth coming back into his expressive eyes. “She said I’d adopted the Earth. I told her I probably had, since I couldn’t keep away from it. She was so…she was happy. She told me my father had been human, or close enough, so it was fitting that I’d keep an eye on the place he came from. Not that she’d tell me who my Dad was or anything. Too risky. I might’ve been tempted to go take a look, muck something up, and erase my own existence. It’s _really_ inconvenient to erase your own existence, by the way.”

Jack couldn’t hold back a bit of laughter. “Tell me about it.”

“Time war.” Martha looked fierce. “What happened?”

The Doctor frowned. “The most I can recall from the last days is…odd. I’d just been shoved into the President’s chair, _again_, because they were kind of running out of options. Also, I think there was some weird bit of hero worship going on, but that’s skeevy and I try not to think about it. Anyway: last days of the war against the Daleks, and what’s left of the army and the Council want to try out a new weapon. The worst sort of weapon. I used the influence the idiots gave me and told them absolutely not. Never. We could lose the war, and possibly that entire quadrant of the universe, but that weapon…they couldn’t see it. They were so fucking blind.”

Jack blinked in surprise. He’d never heard the Doctor’s language dip towards the foul end of humanity’s spectrum before. It would probably be hot under other circumstances.

“Blind to what?” Tish asked in a whisper.

“The math was wrong. If they’d set it off, it would have never stopped. They wanted to end the entire universe just to end the war, and they were going to light that fuse no matter what I said or did.” The Doctor swallowed down the last of the lemon-infused water. “So…I locked the Time War away. I locked everyone away. The only person I knew who wasn’t going to be inside that lock was Susan, because she chose to marry a human, share her lifespan with him, and when he died…she refused to regenerate. She was already gone. I didn’t have to worry about my granddaughter or any of her children being on Gallifrey, and I was so glad.”

The Doctor abruptly wiped at his eyes. “Sorry. Uhm. So, basically, you asked why I could forgive a man suffering from madness of everything he’d done? It’s because I did something so much worse, and I was sane when I did it.”

“Doc,” Jack said, feeling his heart clench in sorrow. “You literally saved the rest of the universe.”

“Did I?” the Doctor asked, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “The Daleks got out, Jack. You saw it. If they escaped, how long until those idiots and their weapon figure out the same thing?”

Jack leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know. But hey, fixed point in time, Doctor. I’ll be there if they ever decide to be that stupid. You just have to ask.”

The Doctor stared at him. “I don’t deserve that. Not after what I did to you.”

Jack smiled. “Shut up. There are worse things in the universe, Doctor.”

Francine reached out and put her hand on the Doctor’s arm. “You knew it was wrong. The mad dog didn’t. I…I hate him. I’m sorry, I do. But I’m sorry.”

“If I’d just been able to try one more time. Just once more,” the Doctor whispered. “Maybe I would have been able to figure it out. Vaccinations against the Eye, right?”

“I understand.” Francine pulled the Doctor into a hug before he could protest.

Jack watched, the bottom falling out of his stomach and weight pressing down on his shoulders as he watched the Doctor’s shoulders shake with heaving grief. Francine merely patted the back of the Doctor’s dusty jacket and held onto him, like a mother comforting a heartbroken child.

All of it happened in complete silence.

**Author's Note:**

> I lurk on Tumblr @deadcatwithaflamethrower


End file.
